Evora - city of bones

Next stop: Evora. Although I didn't had time to write as often as I wanted, and I visited Evora around 2 months ago and only for half a day, I would definitely recommend it as a place worth visited    (maybe not more than 1 or 2 days).

It's a typical Portuguese city, the heart of Alentejo, with a beautiful, filigree-style-Lego-type-that-focuses-on-the-attention-to-details architecture in the authentic Portuguese style, that was for me love at first sight (maybe because it reminded me of some small house collection toys from the Kinder Surprise that I used to play with when I was little).

What I liked the most on my quick visit there besides the small medieval streets with coquette little stores and gift shops, was:

1. The cathedral: typical for the country -Gothic, nice clauster (interior garden), can climb on top to have a beautiful view over the city;

2. The Chapel of Bones: kinda small, and kinda scary - a 200 m square room, with walls and ceiling decorated by approximately 5000 human skulls and bones- like real dead people skeletons surrounding you from everywhere . The entrance to the chapel has a clear message for you as you enter: We bones that here are, for yours await - like what??! really, I'm young, I don't need to be reminded that I will end up pack of bones!!  Really people...I mean who can have such an idea? It was something like: "Oh, I just woke up this morning I was was thinking that maybe we can decorate a church with dead people"?. And another question I have: Did they just dug up some old corpses from the graveyard and put them on the walls, or did the people donate themselves? how sick is that? and more how can someone pray in such a place? Anyway, It was creepy, but kind of awesome also - even in some twisted way it made sense after you read what is written on the ceiling: "Better is the day of death than the day of birth"  So yeah, they kind of want to celebrate the death and passing to the other side where thing are supposed to be better - STILL WEIRD in my oppinion.

3. The roman temple kept in the middle of a new square that has new architectural intervention as well as medieval building and close to the Gothic cathedral - very nice contrast between the different times in history, and also a reminder of how architecture evolved...so, I liked the fact that you have like a comparative point between the buildings and can see the evolution right before your eyes, in a material form.

So that's it, for more information, visit Evora, it  worths your time. 

Trip to Alentejo: Montemor-o-novo

Another beautiful part of Portugal I've discovered over my trip this weekend is Alentejo (the South-Central part of the country), and the first city I've visited was Montemor-o-novo.

As I will later on notice, this little city is a typical one for this region - an area rich in agriculture with olives tree orchards, cork tree forests, cows, sheep and pigs running free on the green fields, with very small medieval cities spread around in between the hills.

The architecture is unitary: white houses with painted accents of yellow, blue or red as well as ajulezos accents (but very few comparing to Lisbon) glued together  to form medieval  

urban tissue - with narrow, labyrinthine streets going up hill to a stone castle that reigns over the area from the higher place. This can be named the "the Alentejo model of a city" - with no exception! (I've seen this weekend at least 20 castles - one in every city).

But what makes this city special, and the castle (now just ruins) unique is that this is the place where the important decisions were made, such as the decision to go and discover India as well as the decision to build the University of Coimbra.

Besides the castle and the breathtaking view over the surroundings there is not much to see in this very little city - maybe just walk for a while on the streets discovering the beauty of the place and taking in the atmosphere as well as observing the peaceful and quiet way of life of the people here (for example you can notice that every house has this stone washer that women use to wash the clothes by hand, as in the old times).

So if you want to slow down and breathe the fresh, clean air, I recommend a trip to Alentejo - the place where time stops.